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By Root 987 0

house painted white, like his beloved hives, and the roof was made of red Mexican tiles curved to channel rain to the gutters, and Aguirre had engineered the gutters to empty into great stone pilas at every corner, where a hundred gallons of water in each could easily gather in a few days of the rainy season. Atop the adobe wall that ran across the mouth of the courtyard, Huila had planted geraniums in pots. A great nopal stood fifteen feet tall on the west side of the gate. To the east, on the left side of the entrance, a series of trellises held up honeysuckle, morning glories, sweet peas, and trumpet vines. Three stone steps within led up to the great oak front doors with relief carvings of the Urrea oak tree and wolf escutcheon, and each door had a small window with iron bars over it so those inside could espy who was knocking or shoot raiding Indians through the portholes without exposing themselves. The great broad road from Alamos had been extended to sweep past the gate. Everywhere, chicken coops.

Huila had grown older. What else could she do? She grew more tired as her days seemed at once to be longer and shorter, interminable in the afternoon heat, and shaved down to only a few good hours by the time she went to bed. She felt the rust in her backbone, the painful catch in her hips, the dull ache in the dry knot of her womb. Her eyes felt forever dry, yet her vision was wet, as if tears had filled her eyes, or some film had fallen on them. Life shifting, as life does.

She had added sacred objects to her altar, as she studied this desert land. There was the troubling seedpod of what the local healers called the devil’s claw. When she’d first seen it, she’d taken it to be the skull of some evil rat with long antlers. She had found a mummified baby rattlesnake that she kept beside her clear glass of bampo-water. It was too potent a talisman to let it stray far from a bit of clear soul-substance like that. Tomás had given her his Apache snake rattle, too. She knew these Yaqui bastards up here had some arrangement with rattlesnakes, so she was glad for the medicine. She had a pot of Tomás’s honey beside her bed as well, but that was because she liked to eat it by the spoonful. Still, its clarity was worth meditation and prayer—Huila knew that any clear substance, especially one as sticky and sweet as honey, and one that came from bees, had to have some kind of hidden meaning and sacred use. She was just too tired to get around to it.

On the floor before her altar were desert skulls. She knew some crazy healers who kept human skulls in their homes, but this was a thing of demons. Let the devil come of a night and bugger them while they slept! Cabrones! That’s what they got! No, she had two coyote skulls that seemed very sacred and wily and she had a javelina skull, with its wicked tusks rising orange from its bony jaw. These little stinkpigs were perhaps the true spirits of this land, so she studied the skull often and tried to orchestrate some agreement with it. One morning she had walked out into the desert, looking for a sacred spot where she could burn her herbs and talk to Itom Achai. As she had come around a hedionda bush, a javelina had snorted and burst from its shade in a storm of twigs and squeals and dust, and Huila had jumped two feet and fallen on her rump, spitting curses as the pig ran for its life, its tail whirling behind it like a propeller. And she had risen in time for the rest of the herd of pigs, forty-eight of them, to burst out of the bushes behind her with more uproar and she had fallen over again, heart slamming her old ribs. Perhaps she kept the javelina skull for a touch of revenge.

And the girl. Huila had seen the buds rise on her flat chest. More, she had seen the buckaroos see the buds rise. Teresita had ridden on their saddles, had bounced on their bunks, had sung their songs with their guitars. She had caught Teresita retching after one of them had given her a plug of tobacco to chew. And her face was more like pinche Tomás’s every year. Huila had not known what to do with all these